Monday, September 7, 2015

"'In general, those who feel the imperfections of this world most keenly are disinclined to set much store by the lives of others.'"

"Were [Tolstoy]'s ethical principles so pure that they could not be put to bad use? Or was his ideology 'an act of violence against ordinary human nature,' almost identical with Bolshevism in its desire to remake people and build paradise on earth? Could Tolstoyanism indeed have been an inspiration for the cruellest investigators of Stalin's NKVD? "Alyosha's account of this debate is intercut with childhood memories of a neighbor, Semyon Kochin, a survivor of Stalin's camps, expert in Tolstoy's life and thought, 'who in 1936 passed through the hands of just such an investigator in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison.' Kochin, a wise and eccentric recluse (who also seeks to prolong his life through writing), becomes the fourth subject of Alyosha's Memorial Book. 'In general,' Kochin says in a grave paradox, 'those who feel the imperfections of this world most keenly are disinclined to set much store by the lives of others.' Tolstoy was torn between his beliefs and the bonds of family love. He was 'a very good man,' Kochin would say, but his renunciation of his wife and children in favor of a set of ideas was evil." Rachel Polonsky, "Highly magical history," a review of Before and during, by Vladimir Sharov, trans. Oliver Ready, New York review of books 62, no. 12 (July 9, 2015): 72 (71-74). Polonsky closes her review with the words of Vyacheslav Molotov: "When asked why terror had been necessary, he replied, 'We do not have ready-made pure people, purged of all sins'" (Molotov remembers: inside Kremlin politics—Conversations with Felix Chuev, ed. Albert Resis (Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 63 and 255). In between these two quotations is more along these lines.